Search your business name and you will find your address written three or four ways. One has the suite number, one drops it, one has an old phone number from two offices ago.
You typed one of those. The rest arrived without you.
Where do the other versions come from?
Directory sites buy business data in bulk from a handful of data companies. Those companies pull from public records, phone listings, credit files and each other.
Your business gets into that pool the first time you file anything. From there it spreads to hundreds of sites, and each one copies whatever it received on the day it copied.
So a suite number you dropped in 2021 lives on somewhere. A phone number you disconnected shows on a site nobody at your company has ever visited.
Why does Google care about any of this?
Google has to decide that you are one business at one address. That sounds obvious to you and it is guesswork to a machine.
When the same name, address and phone number appear the same way in many places, that guess gets easy. When they disagree, Google has less confidence in every part of your listing.
Confidence is a large part of who appears in the map. Two similar companies competing for the same three spots often differ on how tidy their listings are.
Which listings count?
Fewer than people think. The pile worth your time is small.
Google Business Profile. This one outweighs everything else. Get it right first.
Apple Business Connect and Bing Places. Free, fast, and they feed maps on phones that are not Android.
The big aggregators. A handful of data companies feed most of the smaller directories. Fixing the source beats fixing four hundred copies.
Your trade directories. The association, the licensing board, the manufacturer locator. These count for a lot in your trade, and customers read them.
Everything after that is a long tail worth cleaning slowly and not worth paying much for.
What counts as a mismatch?
Less than you would guess, and more than feels fair.
“Suite 4” against “Ste 4” is fine. “Street” against “St” is fine. Google handles ordinary abbreviations.
Trouble comes from a different phone number, a missing or extra suite, or a different street number. A business name with words added does it too, so “Miller Heating and Air LLC” against “Miller Heating and Air” is worth fixing.
How do you find your own strays?
Three searches, ten minutes, and you will find most of them.
Search your business name in quotes. Then search your phone number in quotes, which is the one that finds the surprises. Then search your street address in quotes.
Write down every version you see in a spreadsheet with the site it appeared on. That spreadsheet is the whole project.
What if you moved, or changed your number?
Then this is your highest value hour of the year, and most businesses never spend it.
An old address on forty directories tells Google you might be two businesses, or one business at the wrong place. Both damage the map listing you depend on.
Work through the list from the top. Google first, then the aggregators, then anything a customer would click.
How long until it helps?
Weeks to a few months. Directories update on their own schedules and some are slow.
The change usually appears as your map listing showing up for searches slightly further out, or in more of them. Not as a jump to first place overnight.
Do the fix once and it lasts, provided nobody changes your phone number without telling the office.
Getting somebody else to do it
This is dull, repetitive work, and the reason it never gets done is that no afternoon is ever the right afternoon.
That is what our local citation building work is. We find every version of your details across the web, correct them at the source, and give you the list of what we changed.
Want to see what your listings look like today? Book a call and we will pull them up together.